1. Technical Field
The disclosure relates to a partitioning method and apparatus, and more particularly, to a method for partitioning a soft buffer in a time-division duplex (TDD) system and an apparatus using the same.
2. Related Art
A long-term evolution (LTE) system supporting the 3GPP Rel-8 standard and/or the 3GPP Rel-9 standard are developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a successor of a universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), for further enhancing performance of the UMTS to satisfy increasing needs of users. The LTE system includes a new radio interface and a radio network architecture that provides a high data rate, low latency, packet optimization, and improved system capacity and coverage. In the LTE system, a radio access network known as an evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN) includes multiple evolved Node-Bs (eNBs) for communicating with multiple user equipments (UEs), and communicates with a core network including a mobility management entity (MME), a serving gateway, etc., for Non Access Stratum (NAS) control.
A LTE-advanced (LTE-A) system, as its name implies, is an evolution of the LTE system. The LTE-A system targets faster switching between power states, improves performance at coverage edge of an eNB. Besides, the LTE-A system includes advanced techniques, such as carrier aggregation (CA), coordinated multipoint transmission/reception (CoMP), UL multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), etc. For a UE and an eNB to communicate with each other in the LTE-A system, the UE and the eNB must support standards developed for the LTE-A system, such as the 3GPP Rel-10 standard or later versions.
Carrier aggregation in the LTE-A system can aggregate more than one component carriers (CCs) to achieve a wider-band transmission. Accordingly, the LTE-A system can support a wider bandwidth up to 100 MHz by aggregating a maximum number of 5 CCs, where a maximum bandwidth of each CC is 20 MHz and is backward compatible with the 3GPP Rel-8 standard. The LTE-A system supports the CA for both contiguous and non-contiguous CCs, wherein each CC limited to a maximum of 110 resource blocks. The CA increases bandwidth flexibility by aggregating the CCs.
When a UE is configured with the CA, the UE has the ability to receive and/or transmit packets on one or multiple configured component carriers (CCs), or namely, serving cells to increase throughput. For frequency-division duplexing (FDD) mode in the LTE-A system, it is possible that an eNB configures the UE different numbers of uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) serving cells. For time-division duplexing (TDD) mode in the LTE-A system, it is possible that an eNB configures the UE multiple serving cells with different TDD UL-DL configurations. Moreover, the serving cells configured to the UE necessarily consists of one DL primary CC (PCC) and one UL PCC for FDD mode; otherwise, the configured serving cells consist of one PCC for TDD mode. Number of the configured secondary cells is arbitrary, and might be related to UL and/or DL aggregation capabilities of the UE and available radio resources.
A hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) process is used in the LTE system to provide both efficient and reliable communications. Different from an ARQ process, a forward correcting code (FEC) is used for the HARQ process. For example, a receiver feeds back a positive acknowledgment (ACK) to inform a transmitter that a packet has been received correctly if the receiver decodes the packet correctly. Oppositely, the receiver feeds back a negative acknowledgment (NACK) to the transmitter if the receiver cannot decode the packet correctly. In this situation, the UE stores part or the whole of the packet in a soft buffer of the UE. After the UE receives a retransmitted packet from the transmitter, soft values of the retransmitted packet and the stored packet are combined. The receiver decodes the packet by using the combined soft values. Furthermore, the combination of the previously erroneously received packet(s) and the currently received packet increases a probability of successful decoding. The UE continues the HARQ process until the packet is decoded correctly, or until a maximum number of retransmissions have been sent, at which time the HARQ process declares a failure and leaves it up to the ARQ process in radio link control (RLC) for trying again. In other words, space of the soft buffer should be reserved for the HARQ process such that the UE can store the HARQ process which has not been decoded correctly. Otherwise, the UE blocks the HARQ process if the soft buffer is fully occupied. When multiple packets are transmitted to the UE, the UE may need to store multiple HARQ processes due to unsuccessful decoding of the packets.